China in Xi’s “New Era”: The Return to Personalistic Rule

In the post-Mao period, Deng Xiaoping and his associates initiated fixed terms of office and limits on tenure, as well as a statutory retirement age; power was devolved from the Communist Party down to government agencies in addition to regular meeting of Party organs. All this was done in a bid to diffuse authority, normalize political life, and put dictatorial powers under lock and key. At the heart of this institutionalization project lay the practice of regular peaceful leadership succession that Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao followed. Routine premortem succession was an achievement rare for a communist regime and, as it would prove, the single most significant contributor to China's "authoritarian resilience." Yet today, Xi Jinping appears to be pulling China back into a personalistic dictatorship decades after its emergence from institutionalized collective leadership. He has clearly signaled that he will stay in office beyond what had been considered his term limits, which were to expire in 2022. This paper examines why institutional norms and conventions established since Deng Xiaoping's time could not prevent another strongman leader in the mould of Mao Zedong from rising.

When Mao died in 1976 at the age of 82, his successors deliberately designed a system that they hoped would prevent another dictator. Mao had turned on other leaders and put the nation at risk with crazy schemes. The reason that he would give for blaming the systemic source of the problem-in contrast to blaming Mao himself for the tragic mistakes associated with the Cultural Revolution, 1966-76, and the Great Leap Forward, 1958-62-was because "Over-concentration of power is liable to give rise to arbitrary rule by individuals at the expense of collective leadership". -Deng Xiaoping, Mao's old comrade-in-arms, TWICE purged by him.

Central to this endeavor to avert dictatorship and routinize political competition was the mechanism of peaceful succession of leaders. Leadership succession is typically viewed as authoritarianism's "Achilles heel"-the failure to achieve which endangers regime stability due to the breeding of power struggle and sclerotic leadership. When Jiang Zemin voluntarily stepped down from the position of CCP general secretary in 2002-precipitating his formal resignations as president in 2003 and military chief in 2004-[End Page 22] he was the first ruler of a communist country to relinquish power without either dying or being toppled by a coup. Following Jiang, Hu Jintao likewise served a full decade in the three top jobs and then voluntarily stepped down from all of the posts in 2012 and 2013. Peaceful and routinized premortem leadership succession has been an astonishing political achievement and the largest contributor to what Andrew Nathan has termed China's "authoritarian resilience."2

Yet today, after decades of collective leadership, Xi Jinping is taking China back toward personalistic leadership. By the end of his first five-year term, Xi had consolidated more personal power than Jiang or Hu had ever possessed. Xi then violated norms by not promoting a widely presumed successor during the Nineteenth Party Congress in October 2017. The National People's Congress - China's legislature - amended the state constitution in March of 2018 to eliminate the two-term limit for the presidency-the clearest sign to date that Xi plans to remain in office beyond 2023.

China in the twenty-first century was a dynamic, modern economy and society open to the world, with a large, well-educated urban middle class. The political system, many believed inside and outside the country, was following the historical example of other authoritarian regimes by gradually institutionalizing governance to make it more accountable, responsive, and law-bound. Until 2012, that essentially is what happened. But under Xi Jinping, China is doing a U-turn. Personalistic rule is back.

Why have the institutional rules and precedents laid down since Deng Xiaoping's time failed to prevent the rise of another Mao-like strongman, with all the risks that implies? In institutionalizing collective leadership after Mao, the CCP was taking the path followed earlier by communist parties in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.3 Those parties adapted to suit the needs of economic and social modernization, but in the end they lost power and today are no more. Xi Jinping is determined to avert such a fate for the CCP, so he has turned in the opposite direction. This was quite unexpected: the reversion to strongman rule from an earlier move toward the institutionalization of collective leadership suggests a cyclical rather than evolutionary process.

Xi Jinping has seized all of the levers of power in the Party and state-including the military and police.  The Party has taken back the lead on economic policy, which it had handed over to the state beginning in the 1980s.  As if channeling the spirit of Mao circa 1962, the 2017 Party Congress proclaimed that "East-West North-South the Party is leading everything.".